Rules and the Semantic Web

Michel Dufresne

Advances in Semantic Web technologies, in particular, in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and it's Description Logic flavor (OWL DL) can be used as a foundation for a model-driven architecture for business applications requiring business rules and policies be enforced by the application.

A short presentation of OWL DL and it's ability to be used as a modeling language for domain models of business applications will be given. However, it is not the intend to go through the details of OWL specification, but rather to show why Description Logic (or more generally Mathematical Logic) is important for specifying domain models in a model-driven architecture.

Also it will be shown that by using RDF as an internal graph to the business application for representing the domain model provides great flexibility and easy integration with a rule engine that can enforce the axioms of the OWL DL model and be augmented with forward and backward chaining rules.

Proposed Agenda:

Web Ontology Language

o Why using Description Logic for modeling domain model?
o Open World vs Closed World

o Decoupling of domain-model/business rules specification from web application construction This presentation is focused on the integration of OWL DL as a modeling language for business applications. Future talks could focus on "using tagging techniques and folksonomies for simplifying the management of the business rules."